Morphine

Morphine

         I've never understood people who can pinpoint the best moment of their life.  To me, amazing moments come in so many forms that to be able to choose one and say "that, that was the single defining best moment of my life" has always seemed incredible to me. I used to wonder, which would I choose?  Hours spent in my best friend's bedroom, talking until it grew dark outside and her mother had to prise me out of the door?  A walk across the farm with nothing but the sound of my footsteps and the reassuring rush of leaves to accompany me?  Mad nights of shrieked giggles and swigged bottles and briefly stolen kisses under the porch light?
         I used to wonder all these things, but now I know that one moment can be defining, can be the superlative... but I did not find this out with the best moment but rather, the worst.
         The worst moment of my life was at exactly 09:41am on an overcast Tuesday in May.  I know the time to the minute because I happened to be staring at the clock on the wall of the history classroom when Mrs Haricot from the office came in with a yellow post-it note in her hand and pulled me quietly from the lesson, and told me in her soft, sorrowful secretary's whisper that Scarlett was in the hospital and her parents felt I should be there. 
         I can recall a lot of tiny details about that moment, and they crowd my mind as I close my eyes and remember.  Mrs Haricot was wearing glasses in thin tortoiseshell frames, which pinched her nose a little too tightly so that the flesh just dented in faintly on each side.  One lock of her short curly hair was caught under the glasses, and I had an unbearable urge to reach out and free it.  Behind me, my history lesson continued and someone with a loud, opinionated voice was arguing about the improvements made by the Welfare State on post-war Britain.  I remember all these things, but I do not remember how I reacted.  I don't know if I shook, or wept, or had to sit down, or if I took it very calmly in my stride and asked Mrs Haricot to telephone my mother who would drive me to the district hospital.  But I know that somehow my mother did arrive, and that she did drive me, in jagged silence, to the place where my best friend in the whole world was lying with tubes in her nose and her throat and her hands, and blooms of gaudy red to mark the places where her pale smooth skin had met vicious asphalt.
         Mr and Mrs Blake were there, huddled together staring down at their broken daughter with eyes like the eyes of children lost in the supermarket.  Mr Blake always frightened me when I was little and I used to go to Scarlett's house after school and he'd loom over me and make jokes I did not understand, but now he is the one who is confused.
         They look up at me and their faces writhe into sad smiles, inviting me to join this tight familial knot, but when I approach the bed and see Scarlett's face, almost as pale as the stark white pillow behind it and closed and impassive as an underground lake as she sleeps the unnatural slumber of the comatose, I have to pull my focus away and gasp for air like a diver.  Instead I examine the clinical paraphernalia surrounding the bed, machines that beep and hiss and flash, an IV drip with 'morphine' written on the bag, the searing indignity of the catheter tube snaking beneath the bedclothes.
         They don't know if she'll wake up.  She could make a total recovery and be dancing and laughing at my 18th birthday party this summer; or we could still be standing here when I'm 19, 20, still listening to the machines living for my friend who always lived for herself, our silent guilty faces echoing the doctor's as he advises switching off this life-giving, life-stealing system and letting her go.
         They don't know.